


Bad guys make the best good guys

by MarauderCracker



Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: Gen, Leverage AU, not-fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-08
Updated: 2016-06-08
Packaged: 2018-07-13 20:25:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7135802
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MarauderCracker/pseuds/MarauderCracker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After a surgery gone wrong, Joan Watson is too weighed by guilt to continue practicing medicine. The surgery was risky and the family doesn’t blame her, but she can’t help but feel guilty. That, and the hospital and insurance company’s refusal to compensate the family, finally drive Joan to a point where she just can’t work in medicine anymore. Instead, she starts working as a sober companion.<br/>She’s at a cafe when a mysterious woman approaches her with a story. She introduces herself as Irene Adler, an engineer whose ideas got stolen by a giant corporation. Joan feels for her, obviously, but–</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bad guys make the best good guys

After a surgery gone wrong, Joan Watson is too weighed by guilt to continue practicing medicine. The surgery was risky and the family doesn’t blame her, but she can’t help but feel guilty. That, and the hospital and insurance company’s refusal to compensate the family, finally drive Joan to a point where she just can’t work in medicine anymore. Instead, she starts working as a sober companion.

She’s at a cafe when a mysterious woman approaches her with a story. She introduces herself as Irene Adler, an engineer whose ideas got stolen by a giant corporation. Joan feels for her, obviously, but–

“I’m not a lawyer, I’m a doctor. Not even a doctor anymore. Why are you telling me this?”

“I came across your name when researching this company. Turns out they are insured by the same company that insures the hospital you worked for, the same company that refused to compensate the family of that poor kid.”

That feels like a blow to the sternum. Joan finds herself standing up to leave before she’s even thought about it. “Well, I recommend you find yourself a lawyer,” she says, but Irene catches her wrist.

“I don’t want to sue them, Joan. They are too powerful and, like I told you, I’m on a deadline. I want to rob them, and I have found the people I need to do it. What I need is an honest woman, one good person in the team who’ll ensure that the criminals I’ve hired won’t hurt anyone or turn on me at the last minute.”

Joan finds herself hesitating, considering it.

“You’ve spent the last three years wishing you could get back at that company, make things right for that boy’s family. Now you can do both. A heist against this corporation will cost them millions, and you can use the half a million dollar pay I’m offering you to help his family.”

Reluctantly, Joan sits down again.

* * *

When Joan was a kid, she was obsessed with the criminal world. She had a particular liking for the history of the New York mobs, but she was also fascinated by the big names of international heists, the renowned con-men and the white collar thieves. She’d even considered going into criminology, becoming a real detective, but she knew that her mother would have never approved. She continued collecting newspaper articles and reading the chronicles about big museum heists avidly, though, well into her medical career.

All of these people are familiar in one way or another. She didn’t know some of their names or faces before, because the most sensible information never makes it to the news, but she’s read of many of their jobs. Their crimes, that is.

Hudson is a legend among thieves. She’s in her forties and yet people credit her with heists from thirty years ago, and she has never once been caught. There are some pictures in the manila folder that Irene gave Joan: a scrawny kid with short blond hair caught by a security camera, a twenty-something girl in baggy clothes and a dark wig as photographed by a private investigator, and then a dashing woman around Joan’s age, wearing her long blond hair in a tight ponytail and smiling directly at the security camera as she carries a framed painting. There is no first name attached to the file, just, “Hudson”.

Sherlock Holmes is a name that Joan has never seen before, and she can only recognize two of the jobs attributed to him in his file. He’s a “retrieval specialist”, which basically means “hit-man” in these circles. He’s trained in a ridiculous amount of fighting styles, a wanted man in an equally ridiculous amount of countries. Some of the pictures in the file are gruesome, even for Joan. She moves on to the next folder rather quickly.

Alfredo Llamosa is a car thief slash hacker slash AA sponsor. Joan likes him the second she sees his cheeky grin on the picture. He’s a prodigy criminal, but everything in his folder suggests that he could have been a prodigal engineer too if poverty and addiction hadn’t made crime his more viable option. According to the file, he was already one of the best hackers in America by the age of seventeen. He disappeared for a couple years in his twenties, resurfaced sober and better than ever, and got back on top of the game by leaking the files from a bunch of corrupt adoption agencies and taking all of their money in one go. Joan thinks she will get along with him.

* * *

The job actually goes well. Even after she stopped worrying about the heist going sideways, about somebody getting hurt, about getting caught; she still expected to feel some kind of guilt. But the guilt doesn’t come. She feels satisfied and, for the first time in ages, she doesn’t need a pill to go to sleep.

She wakes up to a phone call from Irene, to sobs and yells that they double-crossed her. “It must have been Llamosa, he was the one with the files!” Irene accuses, and Joan feels something heavy in her gut. He hadn’t struck her as a back-stabbing sort of guy –hell, not even Holmes had– and yet…

She goes to rendezvous with Adler at the address she’d sent, only to find that they are the ones who actually got double-crossed. They make it out alive, yes, but the thieves want their pay-day and Joan… Joan wants revenge.

“Irene Adler thinks we died in that explosion, and we are going to make her regret the day she thought herself smarter than us,” she tells Llamosa, Holmes and Hudson. They are just as hurt in their pride as she is, and they refuse to walk away without their money, so it’s easy to convince them. The problem is that Adler knows all of their faces already.  The scale is tipped against them, but Joan knows how she can leverage it.

* * *

“Marcus!” she calls, as Marcus Bell is exiting the off-off-Broadway theater where he’s currently working. She is greeted by a broad grin. “Joanie! What are you doing here?”

She explains that Marcus went to college with her –that Marcus and his brother used to run small cons to pay their tuition, and not-so-small cons after they graduated. Her team (her team, she thinks, and it sends a thrill running down her spine) is a little more than skeptical. “Marcus is the finest actor I have ever known,” she promises.

“I’m an honest man now, Joan.”

“Well, I’m not so honest anymore.”


End file.
